Sending targeted email messages

If you do any level of email marketing you will understand the power of sending a targeted message. By knowing your customers, their characteristics and preferences, you can segment them to receive focussed messages.
Many companies can achieve this but in such a disjointed way that it is near impossible. Not only will a joined up approach make your marketing better it will save you time and money.
To achieve this you need five things;

1. an understanding of your customers and their preferences to work out the segments;
2. a way of recording and filtering by each segment;
3. an easy way to create a focussed email message for each segment;
4. a joined up way of merging the message and segmented contacts to send the email;
5. tracking to monitor activity and responses to your message.

Great examples of joined up systems are ACT! 2011 and Swiftpage or Sage CRM & Swiftpage. Use ACT! 2011 or Sage CRM to manage the segments & groups, then get Swiftpage to design, sent and track activity. Finally, Swiftpage records all activity back in ACT! or Sage CRM!

Making marketing work

I have just had a great meeting with the guys at The Marketing Eye (http://www.themarketingeye.com) who aim to bring blue chip marketing skills to smaller businesses in the South East.

If you are looking for some one to help with your marketing, I recommend you talk to Neil and his team. I haven't had first hand experience of their work but they come highly recommended.

Keeping the green shoots alive through winter

Whilst there are still two polarised views about the economy, many people I speak to are seeing a pick up in their business. Let’s face it, most small businesses have had a tough time over the past year and any sign of improvement is very welcome. For many companies an upturn sees a wave of pent up demand heading their way – the customer always needed your product but was unwilling or unable to pay for it.

To ride this wave you have you have three choices:

1. Carry on as you are but paddle faster – sooner or later you will fall off the wave. Or worse, it will overtake you..
2. Get another person to paddle with you – who wants to recruit right now when there are so many pessimists predicting a ‘w’ recession.
3. Work on improving your technique – match investment with income and build a better platform for the future.

Now is the time to look at how you are working and question if it is the most efficient way. This covers both what you are doing and how you do it.

In the HR world it is a good time to review how your organisation manages admin heavy processes. Is there away to automate tasks, leaving you to manage the people not the paperwork? HR professionals need to be out there building confidence in their teams rather than doing admin.

Sales and marketing people can always improve processes. We sales people hate to be tied down to a system but grudgingly admit that things work best when we are. I for one need to go through my sales pipeline to remove those deals that never seem to close – it was worth chasing them when I had the time but now I’ve got enough ‘winners’ to work on.

What use is social media?

There’s a debate going on about the use of social media in a business environment and how that relates to relationship management. Three schools of thought:

1. It is personal and should never be used for business
2. Responsible use is to be encouraged
3. "I don’t get social media and it has nothing of use for business".

The middle approach is the one I support, provided it becomes part of a bigger relationship management strategy. If a customer goes to the trouble of maintaining a Linkedin profile, only a foolhardy sales person ignores it. However, Linkedin alone will not close a deal – we must co-ordinate all our activities to build a strong relationship with each and every client.

Like every aspect of selling we have to tailor our approach to individual clients. If a client regards Facebook as purely personal then the last thing we want to be doing is using it to sell to them.

In summary, social media should become another valuable tool in your relationship management toolbox. Use it where appropriate and make it part of your CRM system.

If you are firmly of the view that social media is a fad, have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8. Before you go - a word of caution. As with all things on the web treat the statistics with with some caution.

The 5 magic bullets of marketing

Marketing gurus tell us that we are hit by over 3000 marketing messages in any one day. Most of them seem to tell us allot about what is on offer but little about how it will make our lives better. When it is done well the results can be superb.

The first time I wrote this post, I called it the '5 mistakes of SME marketing' but I think we small business owners are taking enough of a beating already - hence the change of name!

Marketing doesn't seem to come naturally to small business owners so it is fantastic to see it done well. We all welcome marketing that:

1 - focuses on what the customer needs and stays away from what we want to sell,

2 - is a co-ordinated series of events,

3 - is well planned and executed,

4. - is not just an exercise in spending money!

5. - that actually generates opportunities and ultimately revenue.

The key to achieving the above? Successful marketeers understand that they need to plan, measure results and value every opportunity generated.